The power of a celebrity sharing personal anecdotes, particularly when it comes to something as life-threatening as breast-cancer and as moving and transformative an experience as a preventive double mastectomy (the medical term for the surgical removal of one or both breasts) to reduce risk of breast cancer was brought home when Angelina Jolie wrote her celebrated "brave and heroic" op-ed in the New York Times. what she described as a "desire to encourage other women to get gene-tested and to raise awareness of the options available to those at risk"

Leaving aside predictable adoloscent male responses on the lines of memorial pages on something aptly named as the Superficial, there was genuine admiration and a world-wide media-buzz. As the Guardian put it:

“The tragic and heartbreaking information you received is, regrettably, true,” his attorney, Elliot R. Peters of Kecker and Van Nest, confirmed in an email to The Tech.

Best known as co-founder of the popular internet community website Reddit, Swartz was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly downloading millions of documents from JSTOR (for online resource Journal storage), and potentially faced up to 50 years in prison and $4 million dollars in fines. He had pleaded non-guilty. [If you wish to follow-up on that debate, Maria Bustillos provides a very thorough discussion here: Was Aaron Swartz Stealing?]

In their various pronouncements since the censorship controversy broke, Mr Kapil Sibal and Mr Sachin Pilot, the minister and minister of state respectively in the ministry of communications and information technology, have been vocally insisting that the government does not want to resort to censorship and believes in the constitutional right of free speech.

These pieties were once again repeated today by the two ministers after meeting representatives of social media companies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, for what is now being spun as an "open dialogue to empower individuals and citizens" while reliable sources also reveal that their ministry "is mulling forming an inter-ministerial group to work out a mechanism to monitor and avoid uploading of any defamatory material on Internet."